Sustainability in Everyday Life: Building Practical and More-than-human Consciousness to Change Policy and Practice

Talk Title: Climate action and infectious disease prevention: Posthuman provocations from a more-than-literature review of tick-borne disease prevention

Bio: Antonia Di Castri is a registered nurse, epidemiologist, and PhD student in the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences division of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Her research program is broadly focused on infectious disease diagnosis and prevention with a range of projects on issues of access, consent, equity, trust, healthcare professional culture, (mis/dis)information, vaccine policy, and more-than-human engagement in research. Antonia’s doctoral dissertation is situated at the confluence of infectious disease and climate change and looks at public health measures of preventing tick-borne diseases using critical more-than-human theories of health rooted in epistemic, social, and ecological justice.

Talk Title: Unsustainability is in what people do: Surgical practice as social practice

Bio: Colin Sue-Chue-Lam is a resident physician in general surgery and member of the Collaborative Centre for Climate, Health, and Sustainable Care at the University of Toronto. He is interested in sustainable healthcare and the study of how surgery changes over time.

Talk Title: Sensing invisibilities: Revisioning communication across the more-than-human to transform health policy, practice and education

Bio: Sonia Meerai is Indo-Guyanese, with roots shaped by the histories of indentureship. She is an Assistant Professor at Laurentian University’s School of Social Work. Her research explores fat and racial justice, reproductive technologies, algorithmic surveillance, and techno-fat embodiment through critical race feminist, disability justice, and decolonial feminist frameworks. Sonia’s work examines how digital health technologies shape inequities, however also recognizing that these technologies have the potential to be part of revisioning our wellbeing to be more compassionate and relational to self, our environment, spirit, and more than human relations.

Talk Title: Sensing invisibilities: Revisioning communication across the more-than-human to transform health policy, practice and education

Bios: Chizuru Nobe-Ghelani is a migrant settler from rural Japan. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work, Toronto Metropolitan University. She is committed to decolonizing, reflexive, relational and community-engaged research and passionate about fostering better relationships between lands, newcomers and First Nations, Inuit and Metis People. Her emerging area of scholarship is earth-based healing grounded in trans-local ancestral knowledge. Drawing on her cultural and spiritual upbringings of grassroots animism passed down from her Baachan (grandmother), Chizuru believes deeper connections with the more-than-human world can be a threshold for a better world for all beings.

Bio: Sarah Elton researches the ways the food system impacts human health and ecosystems and their implications for food justice drawing on critical qualitative health research methodologies. She works across the food system, studying: produce supply chains in the context of climate change and food access; socio-ecological food systems of urban gardens; and the human gut microbiome from a social science perspective. She is the inaugural Eakin Chair in Critical Qualitative Health Research Methodology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto.